Argentina is the bookshop capital of the world | Hacker News Reader

Argentina is the bookshop capital of the world

theguardian.com

94 pointsa_w37 comments

Funny how omitting a few details makes it seem like it deserves the title. While most of what it says is true, it fails to talk much about the "import restrictions" that it briefly mentions: "Amazon does not have an Argentinian site and import restrictions make it a bureaucratic nightmare to purchase books from international internet sellers" This problem is not only one for international sellers, but for international publishers. As a publisher these days it is almost impossible to get into Argentina. As an Argentinian bookstore it is prohibitively expensive to bring books from foreign publishers. That's a huge problem and very far from what the linked text paints.

You might be forgetting another source: used books. There are literally millions here. Used-books shops are everywhere, sometimes there are entire streets taken by them. You can find anything here, and everybody commutes about an hour from home to job, the perfect time to read a book.

Also, anything more expensive than a book (tablet, e-reader, phone) will get stolen and you beaten, so settle for the old book.

I can recommend Daniel Zachariah in Belgrano.

He's an English bloke who runs a 2nd hand bookshop out of an apartment. There's a good selection of English and other foreign language paperbacks.

Those bookstores were there before the import restrictions

I live in Argentina and I always buy books from an online bookstore located in England, it is much cheaper. And I have a subscription to a local library to read novels written in Spanish. The article is wrong when it says that "import restrictions make it a bureaucratic nightmare to purchase books from international internet sellers"; since books are not subject of import restrictions nor taxes. Capital controls are why people cannot transfer money to international bookstores and that's why they buy books from the more expensive local bookstores. The language is another barrier.

Do you receive them directly at home, or do you have to pick them up at the Customs Office? I do not have direct experience, but, from what I read, the process can be quite bureaucratic: http://www.clarin.com/cultura/aduana-libros-AFIP-restriccion...

If it is a big package (5 large books or more), I have to pick them up at the Postal Office (nothing to pay or sign), that is 3 block away from my house. They even call me by phone to notify me that the books are there. If it is a small package, I receive them at home.

It's not bureaucracy, it's politics. Books don't pay taxes and the current government routed all of them to the customs office to make it more difficult to buy things from abroad and send dollars outside the country.

Before this government you can receive the books at your home.

Argentinian here. Yesterday i received a package of six books from Amazon at home. The package arrived 2 weeks later than Amazon's estimation, but besides that everything went smoothly. No extra charges or anything of that sort.

This is merely anecdotal, and the results are really quite random.

You might get it two weeks later at home, or you might have to pick it up at the customs at Ezeiza (about 3 hours trips from where I lived last time in happened) six months later with a 50% tax. Other packages simply never arrived.

Between the randomness, and the huge taxes added, average people don't even consider things like buying in Amazon. And definitely not even close to a scale of how it's done in the US.

> This is merely anecdotal

Yes, it totally is. And i didn't mean for it to have any statistical significance.

But anecdotal data can help. I took the "risk" of buying books on Amazon only after asking other people about their (totally anecdotal) experiences with it. And now that i've had a good experience, i plan to keep using it despite the known problems. YMMV.

What country has the least number of bookshops per person I wonder. During my last trip back to my home town, Auckland New Zealand, I discovered there was only one "large" bookshop left and it had reduced its sales area to a single floor so calling it "large" was pushing it.

Then I read online last month "Not so long ago, Aucklanders had three large bookshops in the city centre. Whitcoulls, as had been the case for more than four decades, occupied its landmark Queen St location, while Borders and Dymocks were prominent. From mid-year, they will all be gone. It was announced yesterday that Whitcoulls, Auckland's foremost bookseller, would vacate its flagship store." [1]

That leaves one small bookshop in the CBD of a 1.5m population city. Any other city CBD's out there like this?

[1] http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...

Similarly the one big box bookstore of Vancouver, Chapters, just closed its doors. They're supposedly going to find a new location downtown at some point, but that does currently leave the city with no major book store in the CBD.

Even for small independent book shops I feel the city is lacking. There are two great, tiny, shops that I'd recommend to visitors, but that feels like a very small number.

Yeah I think I saw more bookstores per capita in Victoria and Kelowna!

I do remember a couple of good second hand book shops though, near W Pender St, iirc.

I suspect Amazon etc[1] have hit New Zealand harder than Argentina. Just about any book is cheaper to import directly than to buy in the local bookstore.

Once the "medium tail" is lost the economics of a big bookstore probably go south very quickly.

[1] The Book Depository is probably more popular since deliver costs from Amazon are high. Ebooks are also pretty common.

One word: Borges. Strangely, he isn't mentioned in the article, although his influence pervades book culture, even to this day, especially in Argentina, but also abroad.

I really enjoy a lot of Borges' work, but this is nonsense.

His literature is respected across the aisle, but also considered to be very right-wing (he was pro-military dictatorships, anti-feminist, etc.)

To chalk a majority of Argentinean literary culture to him would be to severely underestimate how popular things like Psychoanalysis and Zizek are over there.

Borges may have been a conservative, but it never shows in his writing. I would not call him right-wing at all, but conservative. He was a man of the early-mid-20th century. Who knows if his views today would be the same. Society in general is more progressive now than during his lifetime. A reason not to call Borges right-wing is his strong opposition to the Mussolini-admirer colonel who was one of the prominent members of the coup of '43, later president, and later a guest of Franco. For being against this fascist, Borges was fired from his position as director of the National Library, and relegated to being an inspector of fowl and cage animals in municipal markets.

Also, is not as if he was the only good Argentine writer. Sabato, anyone?

Borges, in his own words, was an anarchist [1].

BTW if you want to talk to a Borges expert, who knows more about Borges genealogy than Borges himself check: http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mhadis/ , and his books: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3D...

[1] https://vimeo.com/73956836

Borges, Quiroga, Sábato, Cortázar. The number of talented, groundbreaking writers is astounding. Plus an incredibly active culture of underground writers and poets.

Borges identified himself more as a librarian than writer. He was Director of the national library for a long time, until politicians removed him. His one line CV said librarian.

Some of the replies at this assume "Borges" as the cause, the response to "Why".

It can also read as a simple association, as in "this article brings one word to my mind: Borges". In Borges, libraries are a recurrent theme, as there are labyrinths, and Argentinian folklore, timeless, godly structures, etc.

Borges himself basically grew in a library.

He also wrote this: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html

Walking Avenida Corrientes is fascinating and beautiful, it's all just books, pizza and theatre. And all three are amazing.

That's quite right, but those bookstores aren't there just for the locals. The huge economical difference makes buying books here stupidly cheap for europeans, so a lot of sales are actually done by tourists.

That's not to say us locals don't read though, plenty of buyers are Argentines too.

It should say "Buenos Aires". The rest of Argentina much fewer bookstores.

By far the best country to browse fiction, classical and humanities literature. Not so much for technical reading.

I haven't been to too many Argentinian cities outside of Buenos Aires, but Mar del Plata also has some nice bookstores in the center. I would guess at least La Plata, Rosario, Córdoba probably do too.

Maybe not in the same quantity but from personal experience Rosario, Mendoza and Córdoba are decent sized cities with a book-reading student population.

I visited several nice bookstores across the river in Montevideo and Punta del Este too! :)

I was about to say the same: Argentina isn't a "capital" of something, it's a country.

Here's the actual list: http://www.worldcitiescultureforum.com/indicators/number-boo...

The Guardian article seems a bit exaggerated, e.g. (comparing Buenos Aires with 25 bookshops per 100,000 population): "only Hong Kong comes close, with 22 bookshops per 100,000, followed by Madrid in a distant third with just 16 and compared to a mere 10 bookshops for every 100,000 for London"

Buenos Aires sounds awesome, but a factor of two isn't really all that significant. There are all sorts of random factors that can perturb such things up or down a bit, and given all those, 10 and 25 are pretty close. I'd lump London and Buenos Aires firmly in the same category (along with the other cities from the top end of the list) as "cities with a lot of bookshops for their size."

Now, once you get to those places with a single small bookshop for an entire city... well... that's a bit worrying...

Curious -- I remember only one or two bookshops, and for a couple weeks I stayed right off the Avenida Corrientes they mention. Clearly I visited the wrong neighborhoods. :( Would love to've seen that theater-of-books.

I saw way more bookstores in Barcelona -- like a U.S. college town pre-internet.

Weird, that area is full of bookshops.

Near the Abasto?

No, near Callao.

Well, something to look forward to on a return. Thanks.

Screw you guys! I'm going to Argentina ;)

I would like to see that bookstore toured on Periscope.

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